The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share pric

The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share price in the short term. Neither company is so inefficient that you can save much of anything by combining the two, and there is only so far you can raise prices before customers switch to trucks or send container ships to different ports of call. With no overlapping territory, you aren't going to cut the number of trains you run and you can't get rid of half your maintenance staff (can you?). Investment banks will do well running the merger and surely they'll issue debt to finance it. But what kind of growth can we really expect?